


Anything

by ophelia_interrupted



Category: Windrose Chronicles - Barbara Hambly
Genre: Angst, Gen, Implied Child Abuse, POV Child, Pre-Canon, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-07
Updated: 2012-04-07
Packaged: 2017-11-03 04:58:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/377532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ophelia_interrupted/pseuds/ophelia_interrupted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of how young Antryg met Suraklin the Dark Mage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anything

**Author's Note:**

> Readers who aren't familiar with the Windrose Chronicles might want to try reading my story "Mermaids in Saarieque" first, to get a taste of the universe. It's not necessary to do so, though.

However it really happened, Antryg would always remember it like this. He was “Antreges” at the time, nine years old, and he carried an onion-shaped green bottle partly full of vodka in one hand. A razor-sharp folding knife was in his pocket. The final catastrophe that he’d been waiting for at home had finally happened. 

In uncharacteristic clumsiness, he’d tripped over a seam in the wooden floor, and tumbled into the open vault of the cooking stove. He’d cried out, and the fire died before he struck it. He was dragged from the pit covered in soot, coughing, but without burns. His mother and aunts backed away from him, making the sign against evil. No one even bothered to beat him. 

Hours later, when his father—already drunk—had found him in a horse stall, he’d thrown the folding knife at Antryg’s face and asked why he didn’t kill himself and spare the family more shame. Antryg had shielded himself with a quick dodge, but he’d picked the knife up out of the straw-choked muck. He’d wiped the slime from it as his father stormed up the steps that led to the human habitation above. 

Antryg spent most of the night with the horses, except for the few minutes it had taken to steal upstairs to snatch a three-fourths empty vodka bottle from a step-uncle who was notorious for the depth of his sleep. It wasn’t worth finding out what the uncle would do if he was awakened—unlike mageborn children, vodka was important in Antryg’s house. 

He’d set out before dark in the morning, hoping to avoid his sisters coming down to milk the cows, and headed for the open, green-smelling Sykerst, away from all the local villages. He hadn’t known what he was looking for until he found it.

The early, slanting sunlight revealed a hollow in the ground, gouged deep by a long-ago glacier but left with well-defined edges. There, the yellow, tufted Sykerst grass gave way to a fairy hollow of white yarrow flowers, purple spears of lupine, and the startling yellow stars of heart-leaved arnica. At the lowest point of the irregularly scooped-out bowl was a skinny, somewhat lost-looking alder tree. 

Antryg made his way barefoot down the sharply slanted sides, and settled himself at the dampish soil at the alder’s base. With his back to the tree he planted the bottle of vodka between his muddy feet, and pulled the folded knife out of his pocket. He pried it open and felt the friction of its joint catch, holding the blade firmly in place. 

It was an ordinary farmyard pocket knife, graying along the wooden handle, but whetted bright and sharp along its cutting edge. Antryg untied the string holding his left sleeve closed. The one that ought to have been in his right cuff was already missing. He shoved both loose sleeves up to his biceps, revealing a collection of bruises, bramble scratches, and insect bites. 

He scratched at a particularly ugly bedbug bite on his elbow and then laid the cold iron flat of the knife against his wrist. He curled up his hand into a fist and then released it, watching the muscles and tendons work. 

He wondered how much slitting the flesh open would hurt. 

Afraid to find out, he dropped the knife into the weeds and picked up the vodka bottle. He bit its eroded stub of cork and then spat it in the grass. The powerful smell of the home-distilled liquor was nauseating. No one in Antryg’s village was unfamiliar with vodka, where it was good for everything from easing toothaches to calming babies. It always left him feeling sick, however. He wrapped both dirt-dusky hands around the bottle’s neck, and then took a ferocious slug of the liquor that nearly made him choke. Coughing and gasping, his eyes watering, he wiped his mouth on his forearm. 

He took another drink and another, until his empty stomach threatened to wrench out of him everything he’d poured down.

Shaking, and with tears still pouring down his face, he picked up the knife again. His father’s words came back to him—that he ought to kill himself and spare his family further grief. He had been a pariah child for as long as he could remember, and now worst of all, he’d confirmed the village’s suspicions that he was mageborn. A boy with no soul who caused the local priest to turn his family away from the church door. 

He knew nothing about the world beyond the crossroads of the spring fair, and if his village no longer wanted him, he could imagine no future but hiding in the wilderness and a slow death from hunger. That, or he could take his own life quickly. 

Antryg pressed his fingers against the inner side of his wrist until he could feel the pulsing of life beneath the skin. 

He pressed the sharpened blade against the pale skin of his wrist. The first cut was too shallow. Blood ran down his forearm in arcs, like the crimson feathers of some carrion bird, but he knew from watching livestock slaughter that the flow was nowhere near enough. 

The vodka wasn’t doing much to dull the pain, although it made his head light and his ears ring. It took him a few minutes to screw up his courage again.

The second time, he did it. 

He was shocked at how much blood pulsed out of the cut. Before he passed out, he pressed his left wrist against his knee, and slashed that one too.

And then the world grew cold, and dark, and as it spun he was sick. 

He never was able to recall what he heard the man’s voice saying from the lip of the hollow, but even in the closing darkness he was aware that it was a word of power—a thing of light and life. He could feel his chest heave without his volition, drawing air into his dying body. His vision cleared, and he saw a foreshortened black shadow, backlit by the red morning sun, holding out its arms in a gesture of command and mastery. 

Antryg could feel power rising up out of the earth, and gathering like storm winds from the air. The elemental forces compressed themselves into focal points just above the shadow’s hands, and from there they struck his body with the force of a cyclone. 

His heart was fiercely loud in his ears, but he continued to take one shuddering breath after another. Dully, he noticed that the gouts of blood had stopped bursting from his wrists. 

The figure took a step down the slope of the grassy hollow toward where Antryg lay. The boy watched as if through a distant fog, hazily contrasting the cautious, almost hesitant steps of the man who approached him, and the strength of the tide of power that kept him alive. 

When the man reached the spot where Antryg lay, the boy could see that his rescuer was a surprisingly old man. Thin, lined skin and the delicate bones of age framed tiger-bright amber eyes. The old man bent down on one knee in the blood-choked weeds, and put his arm under Antryg’ head and shoulders. The movement left him feeling sick again, and for an instant the man held him further away, his sharp, aristocratic nose wrinkling.

The man made a gesture with his free hand. His rather high voice was gentle as he said, “Don’t worry, my son. Soon we will have you safely—“

Antryg never found out where he would be gotten safely to, because the darkness closed over him and he was beyond pain or sickness. 

When he came to, he was lying on a thin, straw-tick mattress placed on the floor of a cottage loft. The air was dampish and redolent of the plant smells of rain. He’d been covered with thick wool blankets that carried the woodsmoke smell he was so familiar with. From what he could see, the house was much smaller and squarer than the barnlike longhouses he was used to, but the walls were made of the familiar thick, hewn wood. 

He’d slept deeply and well, and was comfortable enough that he forgot his wrists, and unwarily rolled over on one. He quickly rolled back, with a cry of pain. 

“Be careful with those,” said the light voice he’d first heard in the bloody hollow. “I’ve put a pain-blocking spell on you, but it won’t survive your crushing your wounds.” 

The strange man who had saved Antryg’s life was standing a little way away, stooped slightly because of the low ceiling. 

Antryg looked at his wrists and found them encased in neat linen bandages. He rolled back flat on his back again, and the memories that deep sleep had temporarily washed away came flooding back. “Where am I?” he asked, his voice husky with long unconsciousness. 

“You are in Emek the miller’s house, in the village of Zhokstow,” the man said, “and I am Suraklin the Mage. It’s a good thing I happened by when I did.”

“Zhokstow?” Antryg asked, horrified. He was in the next village over from his own, and people were likely to recognize him here. He got up, his legs tangling in a borrowed nightshirt that was too long for him, and headed straight for the loft ladder. To his surprise, Suraklin reached out and caught him around the ribs, and then drew him close in an embrace. If it were not for the gentleness of that touch, Antryg would have ducked out of the hold and run for the exit to the loft. 

As it was, he stood there, shocked, as Suraklin stroked his matted reddish-brown curls. The boy blinked, uncertain what to do. “You’re safe enough here,” Suraklin told him. “I would never have brought you to a place that was unsafe. Magic can be used to alter people’s memories, and for all Emek and his family know, you’re the grandson of a wealthy traveler who took a bad fall of a horse. Still, I’d avoid presenting yourself to them and speaking to them. No harm in being careful.“ 

Unused to being held, Antryg just stood there for several seconds and let the old man stroke his hair. Personally, he wouldn’t have believed the story that Suraklin described. He knew Zhokstow was so far away from any wealthy town and that no visitors who looked like this man had turned up within memory. Suraklin wore a dark blue full-skirted coat, a clean linen white shirt, well-cut blue breeches, and white stockings. His buckled leather shoes were free of the reddish mud that splotched nearly everything that Antryg had ever seen. Why would such a man and his filthy, bloody young grandson be traveling by horseback through some of the most far-flung territory in the Realm? 

Suraklin chuckled as if he’d guessed Antryg’s puzzlement. “You’d be surprised at how many people believe exactly what they’re told to believe, especially if there’s a little bit of silver in it for them.” 

“You paid them to take care of me?” Antryg asked, surprised and touched that anyone would bother. He shyly put his arms around the old man and returned the embrace. 

“Well, to offer us shelter without asking excessively about us, yes,” Suralkin said. “I’ve been caring for you myself.” 

Antryg looked up at the man who seemed to have appointed himself his new guardian. “You’re the one who put stitches in my wrists?” True, he hadn’t seen the stitches, but he could feel the ends of the catgut sutures rubbing underneath the bandage fabric. 

Suraklin nodded, and the sharp tips of a smile appeared at the edges of his lips. Antryg felt a leap of hope and joy in his chest, but he remained baffled. “Why?” he asked. 

Suraklin’s smile grew wider. “Come downstairs if you can, my child.” The old man disengaged himself from the embrace and climbed down the ladder to the lower floor. Antryg followed in a more gingerly fashion, feeling twinges in his wrists as he wrapped his hands around the rungs. 

Once he reached the floor, Suraklin walked to the trestle table and picked up a lone earthenware bowl, full of barley porridge with yellow butter melted over the top. This was accompanied by a wooden spoon. Antryg took the warm bowl in one hand and began wolfing spoonfuls down while still standing. 

Suraklin sat down on the end of the bench pulled up to the table, and guided Antryg into his lap. This time, the boy did not resist or question. The cottage’s lone source of warmth, a wide tiled stove, was nearby, and Antryg held his grubby feet out toward it. Despite the summer weather, the rain made the warmth of the smoky fire quite comfortable. 

“You ask why I would save your life,” Suraklin said. “I’m a wizard, and so are you, little one, whether you know it or not.” 

Antryg looked up from his porridge and glanced at the man who was holding him. “I’m mageborn,” he said bitterly. “I have no soul . . .”

Suraklin made a disgusted noise. “That’s what the Church tells you,” he said. “You have powers you haven’t even dreamed of yet, that others fear. That’s the real reason people shun wizards. It has nothing to do with anything so quaint as souls.”

Antryg licked the back of his spoon and thought about that. “But why--“ he began.

Suraklin shook him gently. “Never mind why,” he said mildly. “There is no sufficient reason for hatred of wisdom. It is simply the fears of the foolish, who know that the wise would conquer them, for their own good, if society permitted it. Ask rather, ‘How.’ How can you, as a mageborn child, become a wise and powerful mageborn man? How can you rule others around you, so that no one ever dares shun you again? That is what I want to teach you.” 

When Antryg looked up at Suraklin and drew breath to ask another question, the old man cut him off. “I am old, my son,” he said. “When I am gone, who will replace me? I have thought about this a long time. For many years now, I have searched for a young boy or girl to take in, to teach, and to prepare to take my place. Such is wisdom, that it seeks paths to continue itself. So do not fear your own powers, and do not fear anything I may ask of you to develop them. I swear to you now, all I ever ask of you will be for your own good. Do you think you can do that for me, as your teacher?”

Antryg stopped gobbling down his porridge, and looked up into the man’s amber eyes. No one had ever asked such a thing of him before. But then again, no one had ever offered such a thing, either. It didn’t take him long to decide.

“Yes,” he said. “Anything.” 

 

-End-


End file.
